Category Archives: Manufacturing

Canton Rep – A website has reported that Ohio-based Timken Co. pulled plans to build a factory in Mexico in a decision “directly related” to President-elect Donald Trump’s proposals for border tariffs. A Timken spokeswoman in an email response said the report is inaccurate. “Timken does not manufacture in Mexico and we have not announced plans to do so,” the spokeswoman wrote.

NY Daily News – Even after reaching an incentive-laden deal with President-elect Donald Trump, Carrier might still move more than 500 jobs from Indiana to Mexico, according to the union representing the company’s workers.

Mirror – British workers who were given the chance to keep their jobs if they moved to Mexico have rejected the “insulting” offer. Tire giant Goodyear gave 330 workers at its only UK plant the choice of being made redundant or moving 5,000 miles away .

Washington Post – If President-elect Donald Trump’s anti-free trade convictions are carried into his presidency, he could unravel the economic and geopolitical consensus that has guided relations in North America for the past quarter-century. Economists and rattled business leaders say the return of tariffs would sledgehammer the intricate border-crossing supply chains that have pushed bilateral trade to more than $500 billion a year, potentially wiping out tens of millions of jobs in both countries.

Huff Post – In the wake of President-elect Donald Trump’s apparent success in persuading Carrier not to close a U.S. factory, workers at another factory closing nearby hope they, too, can get Trump’s attention. Rexnord announced in October that it would be closing the bearings factory and shifting the work to Mexico.

Donald Trump had repeatedly attacked Carrier’s plant-closing plans after a video went viral last February showing an official telling hundreds of employees of plans to close its Indianapolis plant. (Cristobal Herrera/EPA)

By Steven Greenhouse / The Guardian

Nine months after announcing plans to move more than 2,000 jobs from Indiana to Mexico, the Carrier Corporation said Tuesday evening that it had reached a deal with President-elect Donald Trump to keep nearly 1,000 of those jobs in Indiana.

Carrier said via Twitter that it would announce more details soon. Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who is Indiana’s governor, will appear at Carrier’s Indiana factory on Thursday to announce a deal.

During the presidential campaign, Trump had repeatedly attacked Carrier’s plant-closing plans after a video went viral last February showing a Carrier official telling hundreds of shocked employees of the company’s plans to close its Indianapolis plant. Trump has threatened to impose a 35% tariff when American companies seek to import goods they once made in the US but now produce in Mexico.

“Most people feel pretty happy about the news,” said TJ Bray, an assembly line worker for 14 years at Carrier’s factory in Indianapolis. “It looks like they’re staying.”

Bray said he and other workers were waiting to hear details about how many jobs would remain in Indiana, which jobs would remain, and what the president-elect had done to persuade Carrier to keep 1,000 jobs in the state.

Mexico’s industrial real-estate market has exploded since the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect in 1994.

By Robbie Whelan and Erica E. Phillips / Wall Street Journal

The U.S. presidential election is still days away but the impact of the campaign and its outsized focus on Mexico already are being felt in the market for warehouses and factories in border towns like Tijuana, Juarez, Monterrey and Saltillo.

Leasing of industrial space along Mexico’s northern border has slowed sharply as uncertainty has grown over how the election’s outcome—particularly a victory by Republican candidate Donald Trump—would affect demand.

Mexico’s industrial real-estate market has exploded since the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect in 1994 and created a unified market between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, making it easier for manufacturers to take advantage of cheap labor, low costs and less-stringent business regulations south of the border. In the past decade alone, it has nearly tripled to more than 710 million square feet of space.

But the election of Trump—who has called for the U.S. to pull out of NAFTA—could have a chilling effect on the market in the short term, experts say.

If NAFTA were done away with, “on the Mexican side of the border a lot of the facilities will go vacant, rents per square foot will drop substantially,” said Tom Fullerton, an economics professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. “It’s not hard to imagine about a 30% to 40% vacancy rate collectively on both sides of the border.”

AP – Donald Trump blames Mexico and China for stealing millions of jobs from the United States. He might want to bash the robots instead.

Despite the Republican presidential nominee’s charge that “we don’t make anything anymore,” manufacturing is still flourishing in America. Problem is, factories don’t need as many people as they used to because machines now do so much of the work.

Flight Global – As part of a plan to recover from early production problems, Icon Aircraft will build a new factory in Tijuana to fabricate composite airframes for the A5, a two-seat amphibian sold in the light sport category.

Workers assemble the Forte sedan on the floor of a Kia plant in Nuevo Leon, which began production in May. (Natalie Kitroeff / Los Angeles Times)

By Natalie Kitroeff / Wall Street Journal

Enrique Zarate, 19, had spent just a year in college when he landed an apprenticeship at a new BMW facility in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. If he performs well, in a year he’ll win a well-paid position, with benefits, working with robots at the company’s newest plant.

“When you start with such little experience, and get such a big salary, it’s unbelievable,” says Zarate, whose father is a taxi driver and whose mother is a housewife.

That sounds like an exported version of the American dream, circa 1965, in places such as Dearborn, Mich., or Marysville, Ohio. Indeed, the influx of those types of jobs to Mexico has enraged Ford employees in Wayne, Mich., and the makers of furnaces in Indianapolis.

But Mexico’s manufacturing surge has not been an unalloyed disaster for American workers.

U.S. manufacturing production, it turns out, is rising as well. Factory output has nearly reached its all-time high this year, and is up more than 30% since 2009.

The bottom line, say economists and company executives, is that what’s good for Mexico’s factory workers is good for some U.S. workers too.

Greenville News – Michelin executives say a plant under construction in central Mexico will have no impact on South Carolina operations. The French tire maker plans to build its 21st North American plant in Leon, Guanajuato, to produce tires for passenger cars and light trucks. The $510 million plant is expected to commence production in late 2018 and initially make up to 5 million tires a year to supply auto factories in Mexico and the North American consumer market, according to Michelin.

Workers in Mexico’s maquiladora factories earn 40 percent less than those in China.

By Mónica Ortiz Uribe / PRI

They make everything from puppy chew-toys to Dell computers to giant wind turbines, but when they try to form a union, they face big trouble.

For half a century, multinational companies have flocked to Ciudad Juárez in search of cheap labor at the doorstep of the United States. Today, El Paso’s neighbor has the largest labor force along the US-Mexico border. In good times, about 200,000 workers are employed at more than 300 factories.

Workers help fuel a half-trillion dollars in annual trade between the US and Mexico, a figure that’s grown six-fold in the last two decades. That’s brought prosperity to American border cities like El Paso, where one out of every four jobs is tied to trade and per capita income is rising at a faster pace than the national average.

But on the Mexican side, the peso has been falling in value, while wages have not kept up. According to a study by Mexico’s National Autonomous University, Mexico’s minimum wage has lost 78 percent of its value in the last 30 years.

A study by the Hunt Institute for Global Competitiveness at the University of Texas at El Paso shows factory wages in Juárez are among the lowest in Mexico, and plant manager salaries are among the highest. When compared to manufacturing wages in China, Mexico is now 40 percent cheaper.

“You can’t live on our salaries,” says Brenda Estrada, a former employee of one border manufacturer, the American telecommunications giant CommScope. “You just survive.”

Estrada is among those who say CommScope fired them last year for forming a union.

Sentido Comun – French aerospace company Safran Group opened a new $40 million plant to repair parts of commercial aircraft engines in the state of Querétaro. The new plant is the company’s fifth in that state and the tenth in Mexico.

Sentido Comun – Proteak One, the only Mexican forestry company listed on the Mexican Stock Exchange, announced the start of operations at its plant in medium density boards, also known as MDF, in Huimanguillo, in the state of Tabasco, after investing $200 million.

SeeNews – NEXTracker has started manufacturing solar trackers in Mexico. The California-based company is using the manufacturing presence in Mexico of its new owner, electronics production services provider Flextronics.

WSJ – Mexico’s industrial production was weaker than expected in November, falling from the previous month and edging up just 0.1 percent from a year earlier, the National Statistics Institute said Monday.

Financial Times – Despite being a major oil producer, Mexico has long been held back by uncompetitively high energy prices. But salvation may be at hand, in the form of imported energy, providing a major boost to the Latin American country’s manufacturing sector.

Sometime in 2011 or 2012, from a labor-cost perspective, it became cheaper to put manufacturing capacity in Mexico than in China.

Quartz

With wages rising rapidly in China, Mexico once again has become an attractive manufacturing hub—even to the Chinese.

On Oct. 27, the state-owned China Communications Construction Co. signed a preliminary agreement with Jalisco to build an industrial park that would potentially house dozens of Chinese manufacturers, Reuters reported.

The deal underscores the big shift in production costs across the two countries.

In 2000, workers in Mexico’s manufacturing sector earned nearly 60 percent more than their Chinese counterparts.